Stacking Stones​A Creative Craft Blog

From the mind of Jason Kapcala comes an eclectic journal dedicated to the study of creative writing, rock music, tailgating, and other miscellany. The musings, meditations, contemplations, and ruminations expressed here are my own unless otherwise indicated. Please feel free to share your comments, thoughts, and opinions, but do so respectfully and intelligently.

Excellent question! A TypeWell Transcriber does not, generally, type a verbatim (word-for-word) transcript. Instead, we type a meaning-for-meaning transcript. That means, if I were to say, "Hello, everyone, I . . . uh . . . I was wanting to say before we get started today that . . . uh, it's nice to, nice to see everyone here this afternoon. Very nice."

The transcriber would type, in that case, "Hello, everyone, it's nice to see everyone here this afternoon."

This process is called "chunking." It is a process of listening, lagging, processing, rearticulating, and typing, but it all happens very quickly (equivalent to about 220 spoken words per minute). As you are typing the last sentence, you are simultaneously listening to the next sentence and holding that information in your mind, preparing to chunk it. In fact, the three skills they test you on initially to see if you are a good candidate for transcriber training are typing speed, language use/grammar, and short-term memory.

Reply

Susan Truxell Sauter

9/7/2015 09:11:52 am

Thanks. That's interesting. I recall now your previously using the phrase meaning-for-meaning to describe your work. "Chunking" is a good replacement word. Do you know if that word is used elsewhere, i.e., outside the "transcription" community as a technical term? Is it used in the same way?